01/19/2016

Initial Thoughts from Our Newest Team Member, President and CEO Dave Wagner

by ZixCorp

Dave Wagner joined ZixCorp on January 19, 2016. The following post contains his initial thoughts. I am very excited to be selected by the Board of Directors to lead ZixCorp through its next phase of growth. Lots of people have asked me, “What about Zix is attractive to you?” There are lots of things, but the three that I would like to highlight are: the enduring nature of the innovative founding vision, the strength of the company today and its opportunity for future growth. First, the founding innovation of Zix – that you can transparently enable secure communications by securely sharing keys in the cloud – is still the best way to enable the wide spread adoption of secure communications. You don’t have to work in Information Security to know that cyber attacks continue to grow at an alarming rate. A recent estimate suggests that the global cost of cybercrime is $445 billion annually. It is further estimated that global investment in Information Security reached $75.4 billion in 2015, growing at 4.7% over 2014. Best-in-class Information Security teams are aware of the risk of data in transit and the need to encrypt sensitive information. Yet our nation only encrypts a small fraction of its most sensitive data. Zix’s solutions, built and improved upon for over 20 years, offer the most transparent, easiest to deploy encryption solutions available in the market today. In addition, the Zix Encryption Network enables this transparency between every user of the service. Therefore, the more users we add to our service, the more valuable our service becomes for our end-users. This network effect of the Zix founding vision remains a key strength and is at the core of why we are forming strong partnerships with leading companies like Cisco and Google. Second, Zix is a strong company today. I watched Rick Spurr and the team with increasing admiration over the past 12 years as they focused the company and delivered profitable growth. We are a $50+ million revenue cloud-based security company with more than 13,000 customers and 49 million email addresses in our community. We are growing, we are profitable and we are returning cash to our shareholders through our share repurchase program. But the real strength of the company is its people. Our people understand how to simplify security and compliance, and deliver it transparently to our customers. That customer value results in our strong retention and revenue growth. Third, at Zix we have a tremendous opportunity for growth in the future. The Information Security market is in a time of incredible transition. Computing is moving to mobile devices and to the cloud, and we are in the earliest stages of solving the security challenges of the Internet of Things. These market transitions necessitate the transmission of exponentially increasing amounts of sensitive data. Zix’s innovative cloud-based secure communications service - founded in the ‘90s and honed over 20 years by a team that understands how to deliver encrypted communications easily and transparently for our customers - provides a great platform for growth. I look forward to working with our customers, partners and colleagues to deliver on the next stage of growth at Zix.